Police officers are widely regarded as amongst the most highly credible of eyewitnesses. And yet here they risk professional ridicule by revealing their otherworldly encounters with things that shouldn't exist - but do. They include:

Crime scene investigators who sift through the grisly remains of cattle mutilations and spontaneous human combustion - and reach some startling conclusions.

Police officers' spine-chilling encounters with ghosts, and some who have set up their own paranormal research teams.

A Constable who is hypnotised to recount his alien abduction.

Detectives enlist psychics to help crack murder cases.

Patrols see panthers and pumas at close quarters.

A Detective reports the longest-ever sighting of Nessie.

Officers' close encounters of the first kind, second kind, third kind and deadly kind.

Gathered together for the first time, this unique collection of true-life encounters between the police and the paranormal is utterly compelling and highly believable, suggesting that the long arm of the law extends way beyond this world and into the next.

This book makes you think and I remembered the tales of big cats in Leicestershire so read that particular chapter with interest. Last Fri 27th December 2014 I visited a friend to give her her birthday card and she told me that she had seen a very large black cat in the field at the back of her house and didn't believe it was a domestic cat. However she had not reported it. Imagine my surprise when reading the weekly paper The Hinckley Times this week I found that other people had seen this cat and the paper had covered the story. If this book gets updated maybe our little town will be in the next issue.

Mailed to another bookcrosser via the European wishlist tag game.

Whee, this looks great! Thank you, Tanamo, I'm much looking forward to this.

I bumped this right to the top of my tbr pile because I was so excited about it, and must admit that I was rather disappointed.
Don't get me wrong: Most of the stories that Owens has compiled are extremely interesting. It's just that Owens' writing reminds me of nothing so much as high school essays. The editing is quite poor (I believe I spotted a few cases where his notes to himself while writing ["explain????"] made it into the final text), there are lots of books mentioned in the chapters that didn't make it into the bibliography (half of which consists of Owens' own publications), and he often mentions people's names in the text and only properly introduces them in the next paragraph. And did I mention punctuation all over the place and annoyingly recurrent favourite phrases? I'm aware that money must be very tight at small publishing houses, but CFZ really need to get a (better) proofreader. (I'd totally volunteer if I'd get to read all those weird books! ;))

I thought the different chapters were of wildly different quality, with the chapter on cattle mutilation, consinsting almost entirely of extensive quotes, by far the poorest. It might be just that those topics interested me more, but I thought the chapters on ghosts, big cats or close encounters were much better written, too.

It's such a common downfall for books on "weird" subjects to be poorly written, and I'd really like to see that change. Owens' research seems to be way above standard already, and it's sad that the rest of the book can't keep up with that. I'd love for the book to have been more lovingly edited, and ideally more thorough/longer, too. As it is, it is a bit of a tease and a lightweight, but it's certainly interesting enough.

Thank you so much, Tanamo, for hunting down this rarity for me! I'll hold on to it for the while being and see if I'll ever get together that Paranormal bookbox that I've been planning for ages. :)